


you're the only one who knows my demons (only your eyes have seen my skeletons)

by cheschi



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: 5 Times, F/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series, i love these thieving nerds so much im sobbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-05 14:16:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13389570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheschi/pseuds/cheschi
Summary: The road to trust is a curved, crooked one.





	you're the only one who knows my demons (only your eyes have seen my skeletons)

**Author's Note:**

> this was a really shitty week and my coping mechanisms for making stupid mistakes and ruining my own life include writing things like this bc _i live for pre-series imagines_
> 
> title from naked by jaymes young bless him

The building he leads her to is dark and rusted and too crowded but she doesn't care. Her head is spinning and acrobat training forgotten, she digs her heels into the pavement as she takes her first steps out of the Menagerie to make sure the pain is real and this is not a dream. She stops when Kaz stops, hit by the strong smell of dried alcohol and old rain stuck in the walls.  
   
A man looks at Kaz when he enters. He whistles, a low sound, running his eyes over them. He's short, covered in tattoos and bright clashing colors, and he looks more like the kind of men who work for the men who visit Tante Heleen's parlor. But he is the same as the others. His eyes sweep over her like the sea washing over the shore and she is sinking in the tide once again.   
   
"What's this, Brekker? Has the old man decided to finally reward us for loyalty?"  
   
For a moment, she feels the same blankness, the same need to not feel, bracing herself for the worst. Then, slowly, she curls her fingers into a fist at her side, and an ocean of rage and uncertainty rises around her. It is a strange sensation.  
   
"You're old enough to be her father, Kleg." the boy next to her says curtly. "I have business with Per Haskell. Move."  
   
Kleg snarls, steps forward to grip her arm but the cane comes down on his hand in a split second. He howls with pain, eyes wild with anger. But he does not take another step.  
   
"Move." Kaz Brekker says again with his lips barely moving.  
   
The man grunts and moves out of their way.  
   
Inej has heard the stories. Part of her wonders what a boy so close to her in age could have already done to have that power, to have burly grown men and gangsters stop with a command, to wake every morning praying for fortune and go to bed every night with bloodstained hands and a list of sins that grows longer every day. She thinks about what he could have possibly done to get there and then, what she will need to do to stay.  
   
Her hearts hammers in her chest, a song of warning. She thinks of where she was a day ago and the warning is washed out by awful stench of the Slat that stirs her senses and the screams in her head that she is free of Heleen. That thought alone is enough for the time being, and she allows herself to relax for the briefest of moments.  
   
She levels her gaze with Kaz's. His eyes are the color of the dark stone but in them she finds no trace of longing or desire. They glint like kruge and the only thing she sees is greed and careful calculation.  
   
Perhaps this will be his downfall. Perhaps it will be hers.  
   
She opens her mouth, about to say something, but she never gets the chance to.  
   
"If you're going to thank me, don't." he says. "The deal's the deal."  
   
She does as he says, and she never thanks him for anything.  
   
When he hands her the knife, she takes it.  
   
 

  
   
Kaz attempts to teach her how to pick a pocket several times within the first few months of her stay with the Dregs.  
   
Within twenty minutes of one particular expedition, Kaz secures three wallets, four watches and one jeweled hairpin.  
   
He counts the kruge and tucks it into his coat pocket. He tosses one of the wallets, his favorite of the bunch, back and forth in his hands in a steady rhythm. In his tailored gray coat and matching hat, he looks like any other wealthy young university students carelessly playing with his money, waiting for his mercher father outside the sweets store or about to buy a new satchel for his books.  
   
"I don't see the point in this lesson. I'm an acrobat, Kaz, not a pickpocket."  
   
"You can't steal people's secrets if you don't study them and learn how they move, how they act when they think they're safe and no one is watching. Which is what you learn from picking their pockets."  
   
Inej lets out a breath and watches it turn into ice. She would rather be watching this scene unfold from her rooftops. From above Ketterdam, she can at least pretend that she has a choice in all of this. It does not work, but she is trying. She is always trying. "I wonder how many people go to the Stadwatch thinking their possessions simply got lost."  
   
Kaz raises his gaze to meet hers, and she knows the pattern their conversations take enough by now to know that what is coming is most likely another shallow jibe at her idealism or some wisecrack masquerading as Kerch wisdom. "Nothing is ever lost in Ketterdam."  
   
"I doubt that's how that girl will feel when she gets home and finds her gold hairpin missing."  
   
"Whether people like it or not, nothing ever gets lost here. Not truly." Kaz's gaze turns faraway, all previous amusement lost from them, and she can see the change in his hands, which close around tighter on his crow cane until his gloves grow taut. His mouth is tight like he is remembering something unwelcome, and he is trying to shake it off. The moment passes as quickly as it came and Kaz stands up straighter, eyes scanning the square.  
   
She doesn't mean to say it, but the memory slips out of her. "Some things never make it back to us, but they stay with us all the same," she murmurs.   
   
Her father told her that once, when she was eight and crying over her favorite doll getting lost because she'd brought it with her to the river and the current carried it away. She remembers that day, how her mother made a spiced stew that night to try and placate her, how it worked, and how she'd sat on her father's lap. _Ghafa women do not cry. They endure._  
  
She hasn't thought about her father is a long time. His words were meant to be assuring then but now they take on a different meaning, a reminder of all that hangs over her.  
   
Her reply is greeted with an upturn of his lips and a flash of white teeth. In that moment Kaz is more vulture than crow.  
   
"I didn't ask for a lesson in philosophy." He barks out a laugh, cruel and easy, as if he didn't just reveal something. She is almost sure the slip was intentional, just another angle to play, but it was something all the same. In those few seconds, there was a crack in the facade, and she wonders if there is more to Kaz than who he was before the Barrel. If any of them can be who they were before this city.  
   
It's clear as day from his title that Kaz Brekker has his demons, but it is in that moment that she realizes that he is still haunted by them too.

 

 

This is what everyone forgets—that, for all the secrets Dirtyhands keeps up his sleeves and in his crooked mind, the Wraith heard them first.

She builds herself the only way she know how, the same way she created a shield around herself at the Menagerie. Each day she climbs a little higher and becomes a little more dangerous. She eavesdrops on conversations she should be listening to, she slides herself into nooks and crannies around the city, and she learns to be the Wraith. She goes where she has to, but she learns to slip between corners and listen to what she shouldn't, learns to revel in her invisibility and learns to collect other people's secrets.

She sees how much further she can go than yesterday and learns what the streets look like from under her feet. It's a game she plays by herself, and to an extent, with Kaz. 

"I didn't ask for information about the Fjerdan delegation." He raises one eyebrow when she tells him what she overheard from a merchant council member and one of the more politically savvy merchers. Her task was to uncover information about the next few shipments of the Black Tips and she came back with enough information to run Kerch and Fjerdan relations to the ground.

Inej raises an eyebrow in return, crosses her hands over her chest.  
   
"And yet I can see your eyes already working in the information."

The afternoon light comes through his window, painting him a dull shade of gold. Kaz tilts his head, crosses his gloves over each other. He looks at her like he is looking at her for the first time.

It should unravel her, but it doesn't. Part of her does not know why she is telling him what she did. He gets his information from anything with a mouth and eyes, and nothing happens in this city without him hearing about it. But part of her already knows the answer. He made her the Wraith; the least he can do is treat her like it. She knows in her bones that she can do a better job, that she is not only dangerous but that she can be trusted. Maybe it's about learning to trust herself too. She doesn't want other people's secrets but, she thinks, she has learned to bear them.  

"The Dregs are about to make a very valuable art acquisition, but we need to finalize our way in and out. Any suggestions, Wraith?"

He bends down to pick up a file under his desk and she keeps her eyes trained on the harsh curve of his coat on his shoulders. He unrolls the plan on his desk and it is an invitation as much as it is a challenge. 

Inej uncurls her hand that unconsciously wrapped itself around her knives. She whispers their names in her head, and she picks up a pen from Kaz's desk and stares down his plans. She stays in his office that night planning their route until the sun begins to rise and the morning carries something new with it.

On her way down, she takes her bronze knuckles to anyone who sneers and makes a comment about the Wraith being anything more to Dirtyhands than a valued member of the Dregs.

 

 

After three days, news about a missing deKappel stolen from Jan Van Eck's house floods the streets, and the stadwatch goes into a frenzy turning the city upside down looking for it.

They never find it.

Inej runs her hands over her knives and eyes Kaz from the corner of her vision from where they watch Ketterdam in his office. He turns to her and signals to the new plans on his desk. 

 

 

It happens by accident. One night she falls asleep on the floor of his office. When she wakes, she hears Kaz Brekker mutter a single phrase in his sleep. 

"Kaz," she says. "Who's Jordie?"

" _Get out_ ," he rasps. 

She slams the window on her way out.

 

 

She visits the Heartrender the Dregs is trying to recruit. She lays down the conditions of her proposed arrangement with them. The girl—Nina—is on the verge of saying yes. She can see it in her eyes, and she is glad for it. A Grisha will be better off under the protection of the Dregs than any other gang.

"If I were lying, you would be able to hear it in my heartbeat," Inej reminds her.

Nina considers this for a moment then nods.

She catches Inej off guard with her statement.  
   
"Dirtyhands must trust you to have you try to convince me."  
  
Nina eyes her coolly, but she can see the small wariness behind her eyes, the uncertainty of being in a new place alone, regardless of how brave or strong you are.   
   
"Trust is a strong word. Kaz relies on me, but I don't think he trusts anyone."  
   
"Do you trust him?"  
   
Inej looks up at the wide set eyes and genuinely curious expression on Nina's face. She pauses.

Images flash through her head in a rush: changing out of her lynx costumed and leaving it forever in an alleyway, late nights spent scheming, walking with Kaz along the Geldstraat to buy equipment, playing lookout as comrades who have double-crossed the Dregs suffer the consequences, the silence after her first kill.  

She settles for the answer that feels like it has the most uncorrupted version of the truth.

"Enough to know that you will be better off with us than with the Dime Lions."

 

 

Inej turns, about to leave to seek her own room when his voice calls out, low and gravelly. "On your right."

She picks up the new hood gingerly and nods at him. She was meaning to buy a new one.

"Don't bleed all over your table," she says as way of goodbye. "I'll call Seymour on my way down if you need new bandages."

Tonight's fight with the Black Tips was a messier one and they all have the scratches to prove it. Kaz says nothing, merely shrugs his coat off and moves to throw her a cloth for her arm. 

He takes his gloves off, not bothering to make a show of it, which is a show in itself. He peels them off next to a basin of water, slowly and methodically.  
   
He's watching her, gaging how she will react which is precisely why she does not do anything. She does not let out a breathe or stare, but she allows herself to run her eyes over his hands once, looking for traces of the stories that haunt Barrel bosses and Kerch children alike.  
   
She finds no sign of the myth. His fingers are pale trickster things, deprived of light like the sun stole something from him for a change, and marked only by scar tissue that runs across the back of his hands.  
   
Kaz raises his eyebrows at her.  
   
She takes a few steps closer to the window, sits herself on his windowsill, and moves to cleans her forearm. She rolls up her sleeve, revealing the scarred, disfigured tissue that once held the peacock feather.

She rolls up the other, which is free from any tattoos or marks. There is more than one way to prove loyalty in the Dregs.

Kaz settles on his chair and moves to get his ledger to add the day's earnings and store the figures in his mind. From her seat, she lets out a soft hum.

The smell of the smoke fills her nose and it is the smell that she comes to know in her dreams. Inej wakes up to Ketterdam's gray skies dotted with crows hovering above them and her knives clutched to her when she stirs and layouts memorized in her head and always, always new stories about Dirtyhands and the Wraith.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm SO rusty and i apologize for that sdfdsfsd but i missed this ship


End file.
